Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and
what first brought you here? What took you away?
I spent about eight years in Ottawa
in total, between 1993-2000, from grade 10 to second year at Carleton, aside
from a long trip to Europe and a random year in Winnipeg (long story). A
posting brought me there, to CFB Rockcliffe, a now-defunct base. My dad was in
the air force.
What took me away was a triple
disaster: my parents getting posted to Winnipeg (and choosing to stay in
Ottawa); not having enough student loan money for rent and textbooks; and getting
too involved with a bad crowd. There’s a fair amount I could tell about what
took me away, but I’ll try to be brief.
Some older friends helped during my worst crises of housing and hunger (poetry friends, I might add). One friend let me couch surf at his studio apartment overlooking Bank Street, but made me ditch all my stuff, then kicked me out for coming home too late. (Taking the bus and/or walking everywhere, timing was not my forte). Off I went to surf couch at another poet’s place. Another friend helped me make a midnight move from Mechanicsville to his cabin in Quebec until the dust settled, but he wanted more from me than I could give. Back on the streets, I busked my heart out in the Byward Market and on Sparks Street, played my first paid gig at the Elbow Room, tried working several shitty F&B jobs, saw my first concerts (including Emm Gryner, whose excellent book on singing and David Bowie I’m listening to lately), attended a biker Christmas party as my blue boyfriend’s plus one (the band was asked to play Freebird five times, and complied), had my heart broken twice catastrophically, and grieved my first death, all while writing poems and songs.
At times it was exciting, at times,
harrowing – a middle class kid from a strict military family, suddenly
experiencing freedom, finally… but also learning about poverty and a specific
paunch of Ottawa’s underbelly.
I had started going to the free happy
hour shows at The Rainbow Bistro after seeing a flyer at Café Wim on Wellington
(where the Dusty Owl series used to be), inviting poets to perform with a band.
It was exhilarating to get on stage and read stuff out of my notebook while
PURPLE. grooved out hippie jams, and to hang out with musicians. There was no
cover, so I started going for coffee every day after busking. Maria Hawkins,
the Queen of the Blues, invited me to sing backups one day and I had zero
experience… I must have sucked but it felt awesome. After awhile, I made
friends with some rough people that hung out there. My brother stayed in Ottawa
after my parents left, too, but he didn’t want anything to do with me… he didn’t
have any idea what I was up to, nor did he care, he just thought it would be uncool to live
with his bratty little sister. I really wish we had been roommates. I was eager
to know these bad people, mostly drug and alcohol addicted musicians, and to be
accepted into their fold, but I didn’t want to be one of them. They weren’t
nice to me when I said no to the hard stuff too many times and kept writing in
my little notebook. My last Ottawa relationship became abusive as my boyfriend
and his cronies got paranoid about me. He could yell and curse at me, fine, but
when he ordered me to stop writing, I crumbled. We had a big fight. A couple
days later, my dad called and said, by the way, mom has breast cancer and she’s
going for surgery in Edmonton next week. Abusive blues boyfriend was heading
off to his gig; as soon as he left, I called a cab to the Greyhound station and
got out of there. I heard he died last year, but a lot of that crowd beat him
to it. I’m grateful my father let me come home and be close to my mother after
her surgery. In a way, her surgery saved both of us.
As prolific as I was, there’s so much that happened back then that I didn’t write about, and can’t even put a pen to now… some really bad things my mind has partly or even entirely blocked out, but that are still inside me. My 2018 collection Night Flying deals with heartbreak, both from being constantly uprooted as a brat and after, to losing people I loved, but if it were to be considered a memoir in poetry rather than a collection of snapshots, there would be so much missing from it. Just the other night, I realized I might not have come through the worst times completely unscathed. My partner and I were watching a movie that brought back feelings around a traumatic event from Ottawa that I hadn’t thought of in years, a time I literally had to run for my life from a stalker, and it wrecked me for a couple of days afterward. I may have had a bit of a nervous breakdown and quit three musical projects the next day. Still, although I don’t remember writing about that particular event, there are huge bags of notebooks from that time that I haven’t even looked at or transcribed, but continue carrying around. During one move, I nearly lost all of them, but went back to the house, rooted through umpteen garbage bags, and located them. Stuart Ross even wrote a poem about it that appears in his New and Selected book, Hey! Crumbling Balcony. He’s a fine friend and has been a big influence on my poetry.
Q: How did you first get involved in
writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
When I moved to Ottawa at the start of
Grade 10, I was determined to be accepted. In Cold Lake, I was ostracized by
kids for having lived in Germany and having a German last name (automatic Nazi),
which was ridiculous because at least half of them had lived on a Canadian base
in Germany, too. Anyway, Ottawa would be different; I would try to fit in with
the preps. A big-boned longhaired hippie in a blouse and bell bottoms with an
army vest started talking to me, and the other kids scowled at us both. It was
clear he was an outcast and I tried to ignore him, but he was so persistent and
so funny, I couldn’t keep a straight face. Pretty soon, I learned how lame the
preppies were, and Armour, who turned out to live two doors down on base,
became my best friend. He was determined to break me out of the serious,
defensive shell I’d grown around me in junior high.
One day when I was over for a visit (he
lived two doors down on Rockcliffe Base), we went down to the rec room. He put
paper and pen in my hand, turned on a Cream or Robyn Hitchcock or Deep Purple
or Loreena McKennitt record, and said, write. We would write until the record
was over and then share what we wrote. Then his sweet, petite French Canadian
mom would come down and give us roast beef dinner and we’d watch X-Files.
Armour had been writing since he was in elementary school, had antiquarian
poetry books on his shelves, lots of mythical creature and occult books too, and
he knew crazy stories about Byron, Keats, Frost, etc. I have video of him in
San Francisco saying, “Everyone thinks Robert Frost was this nice old man in the
woods, but he used to beat his wife and kids behind the woodpile.” Armour was a
master of irreverence and absurdity.
One day we got on a bus and went
downtown, and walked into Cafe Wim, where they would let you sit for hours
drinking coffee served with a little Dutch cookie on the plate. The owner’s
wife was a photographer, and there were big photos of tulips on the wall and a
bike on the ceiling. They hadn’t built the American Embassy yet, and you could
see Parliament Hill from the windows that faced Wellington. We heard some noise
and investigated. A guy was on the mic, and everyone yelled “Hiiiiii,
Steeeeeeve”. That was Steve Zytfeld of course. The Dusty Owl poetry reading
that proceeded included many of the poets that I’d come to know in Ottawa, though
my memory peoples the place with practically everyone active at the time (Ronnie
R. Brown, Sylvia Adams, Baird, Kane Faucher playing “Watching the Detectives”
with b. Stephen Harding, allison comeau (now calvern), even the
Spanish-language poets like Juan O’Neill from Sasquatch series and Luciano Diaz
from El Dorodo who probably weren’t there, a huge gang).
Armour and I got out our notebooks and
got on the mic; I read some sort of Saul Bellow- influenced prose poem about a
sad, reflective man stirring his coffee and waiting for the mail that, guess
what, never comes. Armour read a poem that said the word breasts at least three
times. Still, people were nice to us and asked us to come back. As an open mic
host myself, I know I get excited when young people come to my events, no
matter how they write. Back at the Wim, I’m sure Armour and I were hoping our
juvenilia might be better than we thought it was if we could really impress all
these established poet types.
After the reading, a guy who looked
like Captain Morgan gave me trifold pamphlets that said POEM with info about
other readings coming up, and then we started going to Tree.
At that time, you and b. stephen
harding hosted it at Irene’s. (It turned out you really were a sort of captain).
I still have a cassette tape of a reading that includes a lot of the poets who
were active back then: Lynne Alsford, Baird, David Collins, allison, David
Carpenter, Armour, myself, and many more. I volunteered at Sasquatch and your Factory
Reading Series, at the Slam (run I believe by Oni the Haitian Sensation), the
Writers Festival -- wherever I could get involved, I would. Sean used to let
the local poets hang out in the festival courtesy suite with authors from out
of town. When Robert Kroetsch walked in, you told me to go get him a beer,
there was a keg in the suite, and I was so nervous I spilled it on myself, but
he was typically jovial about it. Years later, I would be a writer in residence
with him at a festival in Canmore during the week before we lost him. Stuart
Ross visited Ottawa to launch his first trade press collection, The
Inspiration Cha Cha, at Collected Works (sharing the bill with RM Vaughan),
the style of which blew my mind, and afterward told me about jwcurry, whom I somehow
hadn’t met yet. John and I became fast pals, and I’d often turn up at his place
above yours in Chinatown to smoke cigarettes, drink coffee, and hear him tell
P. Cobb stories all night.
As for Armour, he hitchhiked to San
Francisco to hang out with the last of the Beats (and did -- he was the
archivist for Howard Hart for awhile, and chummed with poets like Tony Vaughan
and Jack Hirshman, though he did not become tight buds with Ferlinghetti, who
no longer edited for City Lights Press, which was mostly interested in
publishing Spanish translations at the time Armour approached them). Progressively
more mentally ill each of three times I visited (nevermind beyond rude to
Stephen Brockwell when we visited the first time – how can someone even do that
to Steve? See my poem in the Brockwell festschrift), Armour and I couldn’t even
have a conversation the last time I visited. He could only do monologues and
record unscripted noise poetry and sound effects into a cassette deck. Armour
needs to come back to his sweet petite mama in Canada where he can get mental
health help and medication, but he’s determined to stay there, with people who
aren’t doing him any favours by helping him stay there illegally.
Q: How did being in such a community of
writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been
subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
Back then, I thought writing had a lot
to do with going for beers after the readings and hanging out with writers. It
wasn’t just about writing; it was about being a writer, being among writers,
and having fun together. I was 17 when I started going to readings, and I
wanted to be one of the crowd, and to get as good as the writers around me by
somehow learning their secrets. Yet… no one was sitting around talking about
how to write well. Craft elements didn’t make good subject matter over pints. I
was a natural who read voraciously, listened carefully at readings, and absorbed
and reflected those influences, allowing me to write better than I should have
at the time. But I had no idea what made a good poem. What a poet said to me
about my writing, good or bad, informed or ignorant, was everything to me. Some
words still resonate that shook my confidence, and some words still resonate that
bolstered me.
In Calgary, twenty years later, I am in
a community of writers in which I still have mentors, of course, but I now hold
a mentorship role, formal or informal, to emerging writers who take my classes
at the Alexandra Writers Centre Society, or who attended the open mic I ran for
five years prior to the pandemic, or who were on the filling Station
Magazine collective when I was managing editor, or who will attend the
annual poetry festival I’ll be running this April. An autodidact, I took and
continue to take all of the ‘a la carte’ poetry classes I can, in person in
Calgary or Banff, and online, and I read a ton of literature about writing
poetry in different styles. I’ve made it my business to take learning
opportunities as they come, or as I’ve found them, from poets you’ve heard of
or haven’t, including Vivian Hansen, Colin Martin, Al Filreis, Mary Oliver, Pearl
Pirie, Dr. Afua Cooper, Stephen Brockwell, Nisha Patel, Dionne Brand, Natalie
Goldberg, Lisa Robertson, Dymphny Dronyk, Peter Midgely, Sandy Shreve, Micheline
Maylor, Kim Addonizio, Karen Solie, Em Williamson, Stuart Ross, Kimmy Beach,
Kate Braid, and many more, and of course Robert Kroetsch, with thanks to David
Eso. Listed here are some fine mentors; not listed here are the poor ones,
those irresponsible about their engagements with those who look up to them. The
ones who tried to take advantage of their power positions in various ways,
whose hands roamed, or whose words purposefully discouraged and belittled.
Those kinds have mentors have been both male and female. I hope they someday know
how toxic and damaging their behaviour is, feel empathy for those they’ve hurt,
and change their ways. But of course, we don’t often hear from the writers who
gave up. Bad mentors rarely have to account for their actions.
Remembering how the actions, advices,
and comments of those who mentored me have stuck with me, for better or for
worse, I’ve mainly modelled myself as a mentor after Robert Kroetsch who – from
observation in Canmore, from his interactions with me after I read there, and
from all accounts at his funeral – erred on the side of complimentary. “Well
that’s poetry if I ever heard it!” he had told me enthusiastically, even though
the draft I read at our reading at artsPeak wasn’t very polished yet. At his
funeral, many people told the same story: “I wasn’t good yet, he told me I was
good, that encouraged me to keep writing, and I write better now / have
published book(s).” Encouraging words can go a lot further than discouraging
ones with emerging writers; if only they keep going, they’ll improve, but if
they’re crippled with doubt and stop writing, they’ll never get better. I was
once quite cross with an elder poet you featured in Ottawa who instructed me
bitterly to stop writing if I could. It really threw me for a loop. Recently, I
was shocked to see he was still alive – and writing! Who you think is ancient
when you’re a teenager might really only be 50.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
What I found in Winnipeg and Calgary,
after living in Ottawa, was that Ottawa seemed to have more going for it than
the poets there seemed to know. The common belief was that The City of Ottawa
hasn’t provided much funding to writers and poets because it can ride on
federal funding, Ottawa being the Capital, and that that is an insurmountable
hurdle to Ottawa being a good place for poets. Despite that lack of support, or
perhaps because of it, the poetry community built by those living there – by
you, and by others who have helped and participated in the same poetry
community – has created a stronger, more cohesive community of poetry allies
and friends than I’ve been able to find anywhere else. Whenever I go back, I’m
in love with it all over again, and I don’t want to leave. As far as I’m aware,
you’re blessedly short on literary feuds and #metoo type transgressions as
well.
In Calgary, there are lots of separate
groups, but they don’t interact much. I used to spend a lot of effort trying to
bring separate groups together with events that included them all, but since I
became aware of the toxicity of certain individuals, and realized finally that
I was unable to undo it solely with my stubbornness and sunny disposition, I am
now committed to being and becoming the mentor that I think they should be –
someone that emerging poets can count on to want to help them improve their
work and feel confident, rather than put them down or hurt them. Through
teaching, hosting events, micropress activities, and sharing poems and the work
(including community work) of other poets with the poets here, I hope that I am
helping build a stronger, happier poetry community of people who write poetry
in any style they please and enjoy one another’s company.
In both Calgary and Ottawa, there are
blessedly more poets sharing work who are BIPOC, LGBTQ2S+, and
differently-abled than there used to be, and I believe that we are all enriched
and strengthened by coming together and experiencing that poetry. While I admit
I am a white cisgender colonial descendent (although – I know that I am
differently-abled in mind and body, for reasons I hope to be able to embrace in
time, and in poetry), I am a humble and dedicated ally; I will continue to
educate myself about colonialism and the experiences of marginalized people, and
to encourage more poets from racialized and marginalized communities to share
poetry in Calgary whenever I have the opportunity. Hopefully declaring oneself
an ally is not virtue-signaling when the work you do regularly in your artistic
community really does aim to encourage emerging poets of every identity and
background. Our policies and practices at www.alexandrawriters.org where I
teach and serve on the board reflect that intention, and the People’s Poetry
Festival I am resuming event management of this year will focus on and
illuminate that intention exactly.
I do think that we need to be intentional as organizers, and push through the discomfort of worrying about others’ perceptions around our intentions. Our current Poet Laureate, Wakefield Brewster, is doing incredible work in bringing poets together, and even encouraging talented but reluctant poets to raise their voices and share their work for the first time. Thanks to Wakefield, there are so many more wonderful writers I can connect with and invite to read at the festival that I hadn’t had the pleasure of knowing before. Work that is both deeply meaningful to the poet on a personal level, and impactful for a group of people whose voices and experiences are also amplified by the work, in any style, is the poetry that excites me most these days.
Q: Have any of your projects
responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its
community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
My first collection Night Flying
has an Ottawa section that includes what I felt were the best of the developed
poems I wrote in Ottawa, so that project definitely responded directly to my
engagements in Ottawa, as a ‘poetry of observation’ mixed with imagination,
being that I was very influenced by what I perceived to be surrealism at the
time I wrote them. My style in that book, in lower case, with a generous amount
of caesura, seems more obviously influenced by your work than I knew at the
time, but I adopted it perhaps partly subconsciously, and also purposefully, as
I had read how using lower case lets readers know that you are up for mixing
some post-modern techniques into your work.
At the same time, there’s a real lyric narrative element to a lot of the poems (lyric using the “I” perspective, as in Modernism, and narrative, as in storytelling), which is a testament to a lot of work I read and listened to in Ottawa. Two people who interviewed me about the book asked how come there was so much music in my poetry. It was something I wasn’t overtly aware of, but I think time spent at the Ottawa Slam, and even at the Rainbow Bistro, must have influenced my writing as well, with use of line lengths, alliteration, white space, consonance, and assonance to bring in music. For that reason, it's been fun work to read or perform as well.
For the past ten years, I’ve been
playing bass, and I think that when you regularly work at keeping a steady
rhythm, that gets into the pen (or the keys), too. For socials, I’ve adopted
@Multimodal_Poet, because I realized I want to intentionally write poetry and
make music in all different styles – even sometimes mixing those together.
But I’m not forcing myself to
continue shifting my style all the time just out of principal. As many do who
share a certain condition of the mind, once I focus on a project, I often
hyperfocus, and I can stay within a voice and style for the duration of a
manuscript, an album, or longer, albeit sometimes first drafts are happening
pretty fast, before I have a chance to shift.
Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t applaud Tree Reading Series online workshops which have been tremendous as well. Brandon Wint, Stephen Brockwell, and the team at Tree do really incredible things for the development of poetry across the country, including their educational component where featured poets teach, thanks to Zoom. I hope they will continue that well past the pandemic.
Q: What are you working on now?
A manuscript of contemporary elegiac
verse, tentatively called Selected Deaths, although part of it turned into a
Canadian long poem within a workshop I took last year, so now I’m a little
confused about that book. A book of the best prompts from the past six years of
my Poetry Café workshop with accompanying poems, sort of a manual. I’d like it
to be an anthology and publish the work of my students. A book of travel poems,
tentatively called Dromomania, which means the compulsion to keep moving, with
work I wrote in France, Turkey, San Francisco, New York, and Vancouver,
although I hope to do more travelling and add a few more poems about other
places to the book. Travelling has been pretty out of the reach of my budget
for the past few years. Let it be known that I’d be happy to crowdsource any spare
Air Miles towards completion of the book.
